


Theories of Sleep

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Donnie Darko (2001)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-12-22
Updated: 2004-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-25 05:32:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1634138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dr. Kenneth Monnitoff gets wrapped up in Donnie's journey through the divine mysteries of time travel, as well as in the boy himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Theories of Sleep

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Diena Taylor

 

 

**October 2, 1988**

(Twenty-eight days remain)

_Wake up._

Dr. Kenneth Monnitoff woke up.

He was completely roused, all at once, without even the usual bleariness to blink away from his eyes. He glanced around his room for anything that might have caused a sharp noise to so cleanly sever him from unconsciousness, but found himself to be completely alone. His room was bare, the perfect clean of a bachelor who only returns home to sleep. It was Monnitoff's office which held the proper mess of an active mind.

His active mind must have been unusually blank before he'd awoken, caught in one of the deeper realms of sleep, for he remembered nothing. He must have been more tired than he'd thought -- exhausted, even. It was strange, he'd gotten somewhat adept at retaining the details of his dreams long enough to write them down, assess them. He wasn't sure how he felt about the scientific validity of such a practice, but he was sure that even Karen, after laughing at him, would understand his intentions.

Sometimes it seemed as if science didn't really explain it all, from the island of individual consciousness to moments where the whole universe seemed to pause for one thing. And sometimes, all too frighteningly, it seemed as if it did.

Now felt like one of those universal moments. It was quiet, so quiet, and Monnitoff was still not at ease with his odd awakening. He shuffled around, but gave up after less than a minute. He was clearly not going to be getting any more rest tonight. His head buzzed, but he had no obvious inspiration. All he was sure of was the unease that had sat in his stomach since he'd opened his eyes.

He pulled off his blankets and stood up beside the bed. He wasn't looking, but the sight through the bedroom window caught his gaze with the sharp pull of whatever had tugged him from sleep. Monnitoff felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck.

There, in the empty, moonlit street, was Donnie Darko.

 

**October 6, 1988**

(Twenty-four days remain)

_Wake up._

Donnie Darko woke up.

He was completely aroused, and his hands were down his pants. He was also in Dr. Thurman's office, sprawled over Dr. Thurman's couch, with Dr. Thurman herself staring at him with a distressed expression. She had no explanations, but he didn't hold it against her. They both knew he was the fucked-up one here. He figured it was about time they both knew he was the pervert as well.

His perverted mind must have gone to a weird place through the hypnosis, because he didn't remember a thing. The subconscious was a strange place, he'd learned at least that much since even before he'd started seeing a shrink. He was currently struggling with that very issue in his reasoning over Frank's appearance in his life, but he didn't think this particular episode had anything to do with the mysterious rabbit creature.

_Donnie thought about girls a lot._

_Donnie thought about fucking a lot._

_Donnie thought about fucking a lot at school._

_Donnie just turned down the volume on all the excess noise, tuned out Joanie's wrong answers and lame attempts at sucking up, Sean's over-eager promises of getting loaded after school, and Seth's 80 IQ insults. He even tuned out the admittedly interesting lecture and thought about fucking._

_He looked past Cherita's miserable mass and Ronald's extended hand with its proffered note. He even looked past Gretchen's sweetly smiling face and thought about fucking._

_Donnie thought too much. He thought about girls a lot, he thought about fucking a lot._

_He thought about fucking Dr. Kenneth Monnitoff right there on his desk, right there in the physics classroom at Middlesex School, right there amidst beakers of possibly hazardous chemicals. Right there under the poster of Hawking's_ A Brief History of Time _._

 

**October 10, 1988**

(Twenty days remain)

_Wake up._

Monnitoff stared out onto the eerie scene for the second time. His chest was tight and he fought an irrational sensation of fear. What had awoken him?

It certainly hadn't been Donnie. The boy was making his silent way down the dark street with the slow, plodding steps of one lost in the grip of the deepest of sleeps. _Never wake a sleepwalker_ , thought Monnitoff, _because they could drop dead_. It was only one of the lesser disturbances of the night that he couldn't remember where he'd heard that before.

This was a forbidden moment, and even if his rational mind vehemently dismissed it, his body didn't. He was frozen, and his eyes were glued to the scene beneath his window. Again, he was inexplicably devoid of the need to sleep, despite his recent run of late nights, suddenly obsessed with theories regarding time travel.

He wondered if the moment was forbidden to him only, because seeing Donnie alone in the street in the stillest moment of the night felt, oddly, to be the most natural thing in the world. And perhaps that was the thing about those moments. The whole universe just stopped, waiting for that specific event to occur.

Donnie never looked up. His unfocused eyes were directed ahead of him, as if thinking toward his goal, or gazing upon someone or something that wasn't there. Or was there only for him.

His flesh was milky-white and his mop of hair was strikingly dark. He would've looked like a doll, composed of simple blacks and whites, save for the flex of muscle in his arms as they swayed with his stride, the chords standing out in his neck, and that smile.

The grin curved to points that matched his catatonic stare in an expression that should have encouraged the feeling of fear nestled in Monnitoff's gut. Instead it was warmed, turned to liquid, and spread south. Monnitoff was too spellbound to feel sickened by his immediate and consuming arousal.

He tore himself from the window only to feel something meet his foot on the floor. He found himself staring at what must have caused him to awaken. It seemed as though it had fallen off the shelf and hit the floor, certainly an abrupt and definite enough sound to have ripped him from the ignorance of sleep. What was not certain was _how_ it had fallen. He had placed it securely and neatly upon the shelf with the rest of his books at the end of his study like he always did.

Monnitoff stared over the many rows of books, all in immaculate order providing the illusion that he never read any of them at all. On the one shelf there was a perfect rectangular gap where the fallen book should have been.

He looked back onto the street, but Donnie was gone.

He looked back at his feet, but the book was still there: _The Philosophy of Time Travel_ by Roberta Sparrow.

That afternoon Donnie came to him after class, asking about time travel.

 

**October 17, 1988**

(Thirteen days remain)

_Wake up._

Donnie woke up from his sleep, but not from his dreams. He stepped from his bed, mindless of the cold, and the blankets fell away from him like a parting sea. He moved as if the purpose he held was of that profound an importance.

He followed Frank down dark streets shimmering with wetness and stray light from the waxing moon. He followed him between areas that weren't connected, touching only the places that mattered. Everything was still, and he was floating by. Or it might have been the other way around.

The door to Dr. Monnitoff's house was unlocked, and Frank stood aside to let him pass. He remained there, grotesque face unchanged by any sign of new emotion, but the door to Monnitoff's room was ajar, beckoning Donnie further.

Donnie stood in the doorway, gazing through clouded eyes at the drowsing man. He had no axe, no can of spray paint. He had no container of gasoline, no orders from Frank. But he was here, caught between dreams and the physical, and Frank had led him. And so he waited for something to happen.

Monnitoff's handsome face, which had been smooth in his peace, furrowed under Donnie's heavy regard. He began to turn restlessly beneath his covers, and his lashes fluttered, flirting with wakefulness. At length in his agitation, he threw off the comforter altogether in one sure motion of his arm. With his legs, he kicked off the thin white sheet.

He lay prone for a moment, in crisp and simple white underwear, matching the utter stillness of the night. Donnie let the moment play itself out.

A breath left Monnitoff's lips, and then another, deeper. Monnitoff held Hawking's book in his hand. His other took a fluid path, palm spread, over his chest and then his stomach, pressing as if to ease away discomfort. Then, in a mirror of Donnie's actions at Dr. Thurman's office some days before, he reached into his shorts.

"Donnie," he said, and Donnie listened. "God's channel," he said, but Donnie was busy watching.

 

**October 22, 1988**

(Eight days remain)

_Wake up._

Monnitoff woke up and found himself in a position he hadn't been familiar with since his less-than-sober freshman year. However long it had been, it was fast becoming a regularity of the month, greeting him almost every morning over the past couple days. Instead of amusement ( _You really ought to stop kidding yourself about being a professional and just make the moves on Karen_ ) or embarrassment ( _Couldn't you at least have taken your hand out of your pants?_ ), he had only the increasingly familiar unease in his belly to savor.

 _Donnie Darko_ , he thought, and he could have been referring to the view through the window and how he might have missed another sleepwalking ritual due to his hand's engagement. But he felt only a dull shame and then the uncomfortable feeling in his stomach melted away and into a warmth between his legs, and he knew that wasn't it at all.

That afternoon, when Donnie mentioned _God's channel_ , he put a stop to their meetings.

 

 

**October 2, 1988**

_Wake up._

Donnie woke up to what he imagined was supposed to be "his life flashing before his eyes," but wasn't. He'd traveled through time, he was ahead. He'd traveled to a place where he was no longer. So what flashed before his eyes was not his own and not just one. He saw many people, people he knew, caught in a moment that was probably long gone. Perhaps it would one day be among the flashes which met them right before their own deaths.

Because he had no life and because he was caught in uncertain time, he could not be given his own moment of death. But there was a gift in having the world pause in recognition and mourning, feeling the definite and significant impact of his not-life on their lives.

Donnie was not thinking about anything that had passed in the month before when the plane engined crashed through his ceiling. Donnie was not thinking about Frank when he was impaled upon a wooden beam of his wrecked room, but he was thinking about one particular person. And he was smiling, a grin which curved to points below his closed eyes.

 

**October 2, 1988**

_Go to sleep._

Monnitoff went to sleep, moving from the window that opened onto nothing but an empty street, and closed his eyes against memories of a future that had never been and a smile he had never seen.

 


End file.
